The Balchunas family, including Don and Mary Kay Balchunas, parents of Jay Balchunas, has established scholarship funds for criminology students at Marquette University and fire science students at Waukesha County Technical College. Mary Kay Balchunas is working on a doctoral dissertation, with the topic being violence in the central city.

Jack Orton

Don Balchunas waits for his wife, Mary Kay, as she kisses the casket of their son, state Department of Justice agent Jay Balchunas, at his burial in New Berlin in November 2004.

Anthony Bolden, who turned 19 in the summer of 2004, was sentenced to 87 years in prison on charges of armed robbery, second-degree sexual assault and felony murder. Bolden has appealed his sentence.

Rick Wood

Dionny Reynolds was 26 when he became the ringleader of a chaotic crime crew that wreaked havoc on Milwaukee streets in the summer of 2004. Reynolds, who was 16 when he was convicted of his first felony, is currently serving a 117-year prison sentence. Reynolds says his childhood hero was Nino Brown, a drug lord character in the 1991 film "New Jack City."

Family photo

Marques Walls played high school football before becoming a member of a street crime crew. Walls, who was assessed by juvenile court as unstable and "somewhat marginally" competent, was tried as an adult for his offenses during the crew's 2004 crime spree.

About this Series

PART 1: On the streets of Milwaukee, big gangs substantially have been replaced by small, loosely organized "crime crews" of young men who go on a tear before breaking up or landing behind bars. One such group bonded in the summer of 2004 in an incendiary mix of poverty, impatience and the allure of easy money, putting themselves on a path that would cross a man whose whole life seemingly had been devoted to public service and law enforcement: Jay Balchunas.PART 2: The plan was simple and the methods varied little: Crime crew members would scout out a restaurant, then run in waving a gun, order workers to the ground and empty the registers. As the crime spree went on, the crew got more careless. And on a late October night in 2004, two members departed from anything the crew had done beforePART 3: In a four-month run, crime crew members - together or in various permutations - committed at least 10 armed robberies, probably many more. They participated in the gang rape of a 15-year-old Waukesha County girl. And they killed a man. All four are now in prison, two for life. And in their wake are shattered families and broken lives.

Rick Wood

Jay Balchunas, shown attending a spring training baseball game, had been interested in public safety work since childhood.

Rick Wood

Balchunas visited the National Police Memorial in Washington D.C. in the 1980s. During his visit, he etched the names of officers killed in the line of duty. Balchunas was a Milwaukee police officer for seven years before becoming a state Department of Justice agent.

Where The Crimes Took Place

Graphic/David Arbanas

Click to enlarge

It was 1:20 a.m., Oct. 29, 2004, when the phone rang, so Mary Kay Balchunas knew the news wasn't going to be good.

It was the supervisor of her son, a state drug agent who worked late nights.

"He said Jay had been hurt and he was in Froedtert," she recalled.

She had feared this moment since the day her son became a Milwaukee police officer. She didn't panic. Jay was 34 now, a law enforcement veteran and a special agent for the state Department of Justice.

"He had promised me on the day he was sworn in as a Milwaukee officer that he would always wear his bulletproof vest," she said. "I thought, 'He'll be OK. He was wearing his vest.' "

What she couldn't know was that Jay had been between duties, traveling from a downtown office to do late-night surveillance on a drug house. On the way, he stopped off at a gas station for a quick cup of coffee.

There and then, his life fatally intersected with the arc of a crime crew whose center was Dionny Lamont Reynolds, a 26-year-old street hood waiting for somebody to rob.

Jay's parents, Don and Mary Kay Balchunas, sped from New Berlin to Froedtert Hospital in 15 minutes. A doctor said Jay was in bad shape.

What about his bulletproof vest?

"We were told that it was on the seat of the car," Mary Kay Balchunas said. "He wasn't where he was going yet."

It was a bungled stickup, the police said.

Hit by a single bullet in his liver, Jay Balchunas never regained consciousness, surviving for a week in the hospital before dying. His last words, in the ambulance, described his attackers: two black men who looked like teenagers and carried a black gun.

The shooting, the first-ever slaying of an on-duty state Department of Justice agent, was the apex of a months-long spree by a four-person band of thugs - Reynolds, Anthony Bolden, Eugene Rhodes and Marques Walls. From July to November 2004, members of their crime crew committed at least 10 other armed robberies and participated in the gang rape of a 15-year-old Waukesha County girl. All four are now in prison.

Amorphous crime crews such as this one have become a predominant form of street crime in the poorest parts of Milwaukee. Each leaves a distinct trail of destruction, yet they confound authorities by their transitory nature. Gangs have some structure. Crime crews are random, illogical, inconsistent - and in that way, more dangerous.

"Right now I could rattle off 10 known gangs by geographic area," District Attorney John Chisholm said. "But I can't give you a number for the working crime crews we have."

Hunt for the killer

To figure out who killed Balchunas, authorities enlisted every homicide detective in the Milwaukee Police Department. News of the shooting had hit them doubly hard, both for Balchunas being a former MPD officer and for him being the first state agent shot here.

"Emotionally, it has a different impact on you," said Deputy Police Chief Brian O'Keefe, describing the intense investigation. "They were volunteering to do anything, not wanting to go home."

Police had little to work with. The attack had happened out of range of the Shell gas station's cameras. Investigators scoured the north side neighborhood around the gas station and booked scores of people into jail on old warrants.

Reynolds and Bolden, the two men involved in the Balchunas shooting, weren't turned up through those sweeps.

Instead, Reynolds, Walls and another man, Reginald Hart, were picked up after robbing a Dairy Queen in Wauwatosa. Days later Reynolds bragged to a cellmate that he was responsible for more destruction than the robberies police knew about.

Drug offender Arnell Brown said Reynolds "slipped up," so Brown took the story to police to collect the reward and get a break on his own charges.

Police grilled Reynolds. After Detective Ralph Spano asked Reynolds, a father of three, about his own children, Reynolds dry-heaved into a wastebasket and signed multiple confessions. He even wrote one on a picture of the slain officer. Then he pointed a finger at Bolden, whom police promptly picked up at the Checkers restaurant where he worked. Bolden confessed several times. He'd frisked Balchunas and yelled "gun!" before Reynolds pulled the trigger.

When his case got to trial, Reynolds sat silently day after day in court wearing a gray shirt and black slacks. He was offered deals to plead guilty to the things he had already confessed to and took none of them. Even though his own signatures were on confession papers, the only thing he pleaded guilty to was being a restaurant robber.

While this was happening, police figured out that Reynolds fit a description for another killing. One summer night in 2003, on the corner of N. 60th St. and W. North Ave., Marcus Parks was waiting for a bus when he was accosted by two men, led behind some hedges and shot once.

He was 20 and had been changing buses after leaving a party. And like Balchunas, he stood out from his surroundings. Parks was, his family members said, flamboyantly gay and cut an incongruous figure on the working-class street where he died.

More than a year later, after Reynolds and Bolden were charged with killing Balchunas, witnesses picked both out of lineups as Parks' killers.

But people who know each of them maintain Reynolds and Bolden didn't meet until almost a year after that July 2003 slaying.

Reynolds was convicted of killing Parks while waiting to stand trial for Balchunas' death. He never confessed to police, never testified, and the prosecutor, James C. Griffin, won the case with the witnesses who said they had seen Reynolds. Griffin never charged Bolden because, he said, he couldn't prove Bolden was there.

The day Reynolds was sent to prison for the '03 killing, Parks' mother sat in the courtroom gallery with Mary Kay Balchunas, two women from disparate lives linked by the random violence of one man's gunshots. Circuit Judge Jeffrey A. Wagner called Reynolds "the worst of the worst" and sent him away for 65 years.

Deputies unlocked a leg shackle and began walking him off to prison. He turned to face the Parks family in the gallery and unleashed a broad, toothy grin.

Parks' family cursed him. Soon after, Parks' mother left the state. Reynolds' arrogance, she said by telephone, had overwhelmed her.

"I couldn't trust anyone," Christy Parks said.

Reynolds' trial for killing Balchunas packed a tiny courtroom's gallery. The slain officer's family members and co-workers spent weeks holding seats in full view of the jury box. Reynolds never testified.

He didn't have to. One holdout juror caused a mistrial, though the rest of the jury voted to convict.

A note from the foreman indicated that Reynolds - a slight young man with bright eyes and an Afro - intimidated most of the panel without ever saying a word.

"We are not dealing with small time robbers," the foreman wrote to the judge. "We feel that our personal safety is at risk now."

Reynolds sat silent again for the second trial, and the jury found him guilty.

Bolden's case went more conventionally. He testified that his confession had been invented to satisfy interrogating detectives, and Griffin called him a liar. The jury believed the confession.

At his sentencing, Reynolds finally spoke, revealing an unexpected self-awareness.

He referred to himself as "the walking dead" and said: "People call me the monster, the demon, the devil. I be that. It's nothing."

He admitted he was the personification of Milwaukee's crime problem. He said there were hundreds of others possessing the same grim background. They would come, he said, to sit in the same courthouse for the same trip to prison after ruining other lives in the ravaged central city.

Suicide attempts

Prison life hasn't been easy for the crew.

After he was arrested fleeing the Dairy Queen robbery, Walls wrote a two-page letter to his mother that denied being part of a crime crew. Then he flung himself over a second-story juvenile Detention Center railing in an apparent suicide attempt.

He survived and would later testify against Reynolds, though prosecutors found his statements of limited use.

Bolden tried to kill himself several times, including holding his head underwater in a filthy County Jail toilet and, another time, using a plastic bag. Even Reynolds, during the middle of his pretrial 14-month stretch in solitary confinement, tried to starve himself, his mother said.

She invoked God to urge her son to stay alive.

"I told him, 'He'll forgive you for everything you've done, but he's not going to forgive you for taking your own life,' " Yvonne Reynolds said.

Bolden, sentenced to 87 years, is appealing his conviction. So is Reynolds, who alluded to suicide again last fall in letters to his younger brother Cornell - who is in prison for a separate homicide. However, in January, Dionny Reynolds finally got his GED.

Unlike those two, Walls and Rhodes have release dates well before their old age. Although integral to the crew's crime spree, they were not part of the Balchunas murder.

Rhodes, who will be 34 when he is scheduled to walk out of prison, views his prospects dimly.

"I'm 'a get out a felon and all this other stuff, I really can't get a job," Rhodes said. "It just makes life much more hard."

Walls' appraisal was even more bleak.

"Everybody used to ask me that question, 'What do you want to be 10 years from now?' " Walls said. "The way I felt then is the way I feel now: I still don't know. I'm too addicted to street life."

Walls is scheduled to walk out of prison in April 2011. He will be 23.

Trying to cope

Each murder victim's family remains upset that they never got an apology.

Christy Parks is convinced Bolden was the second actor in her son's murder. She wanted to know whether Reynolds had shown any remorse. The answer to that question may always be no.

The Balchunas family established scholarship funds for criminology students at Marquette University and fire science students at Waukesha County Technical College. And they set up a golf tournament to raise money for the fund.

"It'll be here a long time, longer than us," Don Balchunas said of the scholarship fund.

Jay Balchunas' battered New Berlin Fire Department helmet lay on the fireplace when his parents and sister sat down for a living-room interview.

When a traveling Drug Enforcement Administration exhibit came through Chicago, his sister took her children, because Jay's death was memorialized there - as it is in a state building in Madison.

Family members also regularly post messages to Jay on a Web site. "His grave is just a mile, two miles away, so we're there frequently, just stopping by," Don Balchunas said.

Mary Kay Balchunas is now working on her doctoral dissertation.

The topic? Violence in the central city.

In that central city, a woman living alone in a second-floor walk-up is far more eager to show pictures of the people she works with than of her own two children. She cries while discussing the fact that both her sons, Dionny and Cornell, are in prison on murder convictions.

"I always wonder what would've happened if I had never moved to Milwaukee," Yvonne Reynolds said, weeping. "I don't know - if I had had a man living here in the house when they was growing up."

Back in 1977, she had come to be near family members. Now they are distant, she says, because of her sons' crimes.

"They won't admit it, but that's what it is."

Her son and his crew may be off the street, but others have stepped in.

Almost exactly a year after Jay Balchunas died, a machinist named Henry James Cox Jr., 41, was shot in the back and killed at the same W. Villard Ave. Shell gas station. It was an attempted stickup. Police believe two people did it.